On the concept of information and its role in nature

Entropy

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 3-33

  Roederer, Juan G ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA FAIRBANKS   (United States)

^b ABDUS SALAM INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR THEORETICAL PHYSICS   (Italy)

Author keywords

Biomolecular Information; Cognition; Consciousness and Self Consciousness; Life; Memory; Neural Information; Physical and Biological Interactions

Indexed keywords

ALGORITHMS; BRAIN; CELLS; CLONING; ENERGY TRANSFER; LIVING SYSTEMS STUDIES; METABOLISM; NEUROLOGY; SEMANTICS; SENSORY AIDS; STATISTICAL MECHANICS;

BIOMOLECULAR INFORMATION; COGNITION; CONSCIOUSNESS AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS; LIFE; MEMORY; NEURAL INFORMATION; PHYSICAL AND BIOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS;

INFORMATION ANALYSIS;

EID: 2942750461     PISSN: 10994300     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3390/e5010003     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (42)

1. See for instance: W. H. Zurek, editor, Complexity, Entropy and The Physics of Information (Addison-Wesley Publ. Co., New York, 1990).
2. P. Davies, "Physics and Life", in J. Chela-Flores, T.Owen and F. Raulin, eds., The First Steps of Life in the Universe (Kluwer Acad. publ., Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1990), pp. 11-20.
3. E. J. Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution: the Rise of Complexity in Nature. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 2001).
4. 2 is defined as the "inertial mass of body 2 in units of the mass of body 1". The term f=ma is called "force on mass m" in the interaction and interpreted as the "agent" responsible for change (acceleration). Newton's laws become corollaries in this formulation.
5. J. G. Roederer, "Information, life and brains", in J. Chela-Flores, G. Lemarchand and J. Oró, eds., Astrobiology (Kluwer Acad, Publ., Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2000), pp. 179-194.
6. 3 +inertial terms (the motion of the asteroid remains essentially unaffected by this interaction because of its much larger mass).
7. In this article we shall distinguish clearly between "signals" and "messages" (see example 5 in the text): thus defined, a signal has neither purpose nor any information at its origin, it only becomes information when it is detected and used (or deliberately discarded) by an organism.
8. Think of the "A-ness" conveyed in visual interaction with the symbols a, A, α, N, or the "three-ness" conveyed by any set containing three objects. Note a certain analogy between our definition of information with Cantor's definition of integer number: "that which all coordinable sets have in common".
9. We shall not attempt here a formal definition of "purpose". This concept has too many subjective connotations, so whenever the term appears in this article, it should be taken with great care.
10. B.-O. Küppers, Information and the Origin of Life (The MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. 1990).
11. J. G. Roederer, "On the relationship between human brain functions and the foundations of physics", Found, of Phys. 8, 423-438 (1978).
12. J. Bricmont, J, "Science of chaos or chaos in science?", Physicalia Mag. 17, 159-208 (1995).
13. 2 the amount of information on the tag would be smaller.) It is well known from traditional information theory that adding information to a system decreases its entropy by Δs- = -k ln 2 per bit. Taking this into account, the decrease of total entropy in the "mental" tagging process (n Δs) is compensated exactly by the increase of entropy (ΔS) in the "mental" diffusion and mixing process! Note in this example that the concept of information only has to do with the "thinker" - it plays no role in the dynamics of the physical system per se. When the molecules are tagged naturally, i.e., the two gases are different, there is no need to invoke an information process and its effect on entropy balance: the entropy of the system will indeed increase. (I prefer to turn the whole argument around and use the above as a simple proof that the creation of one bit of information about a thermodynamic system decreases its entropy by -k ln 2).
14. Note that the bird of a given species will always build the same nest (slightly modified to adapt it to the immediate environment) whereas a human can develop an unlimited variety of blueprints for a house and change them at will before the house is actually built.
15. Animals, of course, also leave "imprints" of information in the environment for some future use (example 4, section 1). Yet there is a crucial difference. If we were to suddenly destroy all animal imprints (tracks, nests, food reserves, etc.), animal life would still continue essentially as it was today: the key information for survival and preservation is genetically stored in the organism, and relics of animal "cultures" are not used by later generations as a source of information. But as described in many science-fiction novels, if we were to destroy at once all human imprints (our "externalized" memory storage), civilization as we know it would disappear and future generations would be left in a state similar to where humanity was tens of thousands of years ago.
16. For instance, I could look at a complicated Chinese character whose algorithmic information content as a graphic symbol is high - but for me as a recipient reader the information content would be zero!
17. No doubt that we are dealing here with a "threshold" in molecular size and complexity in which a transition takes place to the capacity of information-based interactions. This domain threshold is conceptually similar to the boundary that separates the domains of quantum and classical behavior of matter, the region of wave function de-coherence - and may even have something to do with it.
18. V. Braitenberg, "Remarks on the semantics of 'information'", preprint (Max Planck Institut für Biologische Kybernetik, Tübingen, 2000).
19. The fast adaptive capability of viruses and immune system response really deserve a separate consideration in this discussion.
20. There is a third information system - the chemical neurotransmitters - which I will not discuss in this article, because its function is mainly that of information transmission and modulation of global synaptic function (a sort of neural "volume control").
21. At an individual neuron level, information is encoded transiently in the form of time sequence of action potentials, and in a long-term form in the spines and ramifications of the axon and corresponding synapses.
22. First discussed in detail in: K. Pribram, Languages of the Brain (Prentice Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1971).
23. A (data compression).
24. T. Kohonen, Self-Organization and Associative Memory (Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1988).
25. See for instance: A. Klug, "A marvelous machine for making messages", Science, 292, 1844-1845 (2001), and articles described therein.
26. Excerpts from J. G. Roederer "On the representation of information in life, brains and consciousness", Lecture notes, Borsellino College on Neurophsyics (The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy, 2001), 13 pp.
27. D. J. Freedman, M. Riesenhuber, T. Poggio and E. K. Miller, "Categorical representation of visual stimuli in the primate prefrontal cortex", Science, 291, 312-316 (2001).
28. See for instance: A. Matus: "Actin-based plasticity in dendritic spines", Science, 290, 754-758 (2000).
29. For a similar discussion of the auditory system, see J. G. Roederer, The Physics and Psychophysics of Music (Springer-Verlag, New York, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1995).
30. The functions of the limbic system are sometimes referred to as "the four F's": Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing and ... Reproducing!
31. We could program a robot to emit crying sounds whenever it loses a part, reach out toward loose screws and tighten them, and seek an electrical outlet whenever its batteries are running low, but how do we make it to actually feel "pain" or "pleasure"?
32. Chr. von der Marlsburg, "The coherence definition of consciousness", in M. Ito, Y. Miyashita and E. T. Rolls, eds., Cognition, Computation and Consciousness (Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York and Tokyo, 1997), pp. 193-204.
33. For some recent examples, see P. E. Downing, Y. Jiang, M. Shuman and N. Kanwisher, "A cortical area selective for visual processing of the human body", Science 293, 2470-2473 (2001); and J. V. Haxby, M. I. Gobbini, M. L. Furey, Al Ishai, J. L. Schouten and P. Pietrini, "Distributed and overlapping representations of faces and objects in ventral temporal cortex", Science, 293, 2425-2430 (2001).
34. For some recent examples, see P. E. Downing, Y. Jiang, M. Shuman and N. Kanwisher, "A cortical area selective for visual processing of the human body", Science 293, 2470-2473 (2001); and J. V. Haxby, M. I. Gobbini, M. L. Furey, Al Ishai, J. L. Schouten and P. Pietrini, "Distributed and overlapping representations of faces and objects in ventral temporal cortex", Science, 293, 2425-2430 (2001).
35. A. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt Inc., San Diego, New York, London, 1999).
36. J. Z. Young, Philosophy and the Brain (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, New York, 1987).
37. It may well be that higher primates have "bursts" of self-consciousness during which internally recalled images are manipulated and a longer-term future is briefly "illuminated". But there is no clear and convincing evidence that any outcome is stored in memory for later use. In other words, it is conceivable that some higher mammals may exhibit bursts of human-like thinking, but they seem not to be able to do anything long-lasting with the results. There is a contentious debate on this issue between animal psychologists and brain scientists.
38. E. Squires, Conscious Mind in the Physical World (Adam Hilger, Bristol, New York, 1990).
39. D. Bickerton, Language and Human Behavior (Univ. of Washington Press, 1995).
40. Even in the most acute cases of multiple personality disorder there is only one of the personalities in evidence at any given time.
41. There is increasing evidence this is only a feeling: experiments show that by the time we think we have made a free will decision, our brain has already preplanned all pertinent steps for us!
42. This does not mean that one always thinks in words.